Spike Moss, seeking our fair share

Spike Moss is vice president of The City, Inc., a youth service community organization and alternative school in Minneapolis.McFarlane: Often you’ve been referred to in the White media, as a militant activist...
Spike Moss is vice president of The City, Inc., a youth service community organization and alternative school in Minneapolis.

Al McFarlane: Often you’ve been referred to in the White media, as a militant activist...Why do they call you "militant". Why don’t they call you "Spike Moss, Black liberation fighter?"

Spike Moss: The majority community has never wanted our people to know about our struggles for freedom. That it’s a just cause. That it’s about justice and equality. They try to paint the picture that most of our leadership just like to make trouble or are racists themselves.

AM: Yet John Walker, who sided, allegedly, with the Taliban in Afghanistan was constantly referred to as the American Taliban fighter,. in a tone that was respectful and almost mythically romantic, celebratory. I’m trying to see where in my memory the same kind of respect is accorded to Black people, in our struggles for human rights and liberation. Why is our society able to almost glorify this guy, and create sympathy for the Timothy McVeighs, and Jeffrey Dahmers, of American but won’t accord us the dignity of acknowledging our struggle or even our humanity?

SM: There are two questions and two answers. On the one hand, we have to understand that majority of the White community knows there is a large population of White men and women in this country who want to overthrow this country.

AM: For what purpose?

SM: To take it back. They feel someone has taken their country.

AM: They don’t believe in the idea of democracy?.

SM: No, their idea of democracy is democracy for Whites only. They have all sorts of names. Nazis, Skinheads, the Aryan race. They’re called Minute Men... Militia. They are hell-bent on taking this country back. Our government doesn’t want to do anything to irritate them or cause more people to join or send them money [for fear of a] second Civil War,. Hardly a month that goes by that, somewhere in this country, those groups don’t burn a Black church, or torch some Black home, or kill some Black person. It’s just not on the news.

On the flip side the strategy is to keep us oppressed, with the person oppressing us, making it look like the oppression doesn’t exist.

They make it look like Black people are just making trouble. They’re activists, militants, trouble makers. They make it look like Black people are racists. They don’t want it to appear that in the "land of the free" people in this country are simply not free.

Every problem that happens to us stems from the fact that we don’t have freedom and don’t have the rights [which] come with citizenship, with being born in this country.

The only time we are treated like we’re part of this country is when this country is at war and we’re on the front line.

Or when it’s time to pay the taxes. We pay our share, but are not allowed our equal opportunities to share the true benefit of being an American.

The suburbs are created for and by White Americans, not you. They live successfully.. You can’t count how many of them are millionairs.. When it comes to businesses, you can’t even count,. When it comes to proper education, you can’t even count, because we’re nowhere in that scenario worth mentioning.

Still, they ostracize Blacks, because they don’t recognize our humanity. They began the country assigning our value as that of three-fifths a human, for their voting power purposes. A Supreme Count justice wrote that the Negro has no rights the White man must respect.

AM: What then is our responsibility? Regardless of what racists say, do or think,, what do we have to do?

SM: That’s where we went wrong in the 60s. We let them take control of our movement. I switched, myself, from 1966 to ‘67, I became part of the Black Power Movement,, a

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